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Explore Traces

Distributed traces provide a way to monitor applications by tracking requests across services. Traces record the details of a request to help understand why an issue is or was happening.

Tracing is best used for analyzing the performance of your system, identifying bottlenecks, monitoring latency, and providing a complete picture of how requests are processed.

Explore Traces helps you make sense of your tracing data so you can automatically visualize insights from your Tempo traces data. Before this app, you would use TraceQL, the query language for tracing, to construct a query in Grafana.

[!IMPORTANT] Explore Traces is presently undergoing active development and is offered in a preview state. Subsequent updates are likely to incorporate significant changes that may impact existing functionality.

Access or install Explore Traces

You can access Explore Traces using Grafana Cloud or a self-managed OSS Grafana or Grafana Enterprise.

The easiest way to access Explore Traces is in Grafana Cloud. No setup or installation is required.

To use Explore Traces with self-managed Grafana, you need to install the Explore Traces plugin.

Grafana Cloud

To use Explore Traces, you need:

• A Grafana Cloud account
• A Grafana stack in Grafana Cloud with a configured Tempo data source receiving tracing data

To access Explore Traces:

1. Open your Grafana stack in a web browser.
2. In the main menu, select Explore > Traces.

Grafana

To use Explore Traces with Grafana open source or Grafana Enterprise, you need:

• Your own Grafana instance
• A configured Tempo data source
• The Explore Traces plugin

Install the Explore Traces plugin

Explore Traces is distributed as a Grafana Plugin. You can find it in the official Grafana Plugin Directory.

NOTE: All Grafana Cloud instances come with the Explore Traces plugin preinstalled.

Install in your Grafana instance

You can install Explore Traces in your own Grafana instance using grafana cli:

grafana cli --pluginUrl=https://storage.googleapis.com/integration-artifacts/grafana-exploretraces-app/grafana-exploretraces-app-latest.zip plugins install grafana-traces-app

Alternatively, follow these steps to install Explore Traces in Grafana:

1. In Grafana, go to Administration > Plugins and data > Plugins.
2. Search for "Explore Traces".
3. Select Explore Traces.
4. Click Install.

The plugin is automatically activated after installation.

Install for a Docker container

If you want to install the app in a Docker container, you need to configure the following environment variable:

GF_INSTALL_PLUGINS=https://storage.googleapis.com/integration-artifacts/grafana-exploretraces-app/grafana-exploretraces-app-latest.zip;grafana-traces-app

Learn more

To learn more about Explore Traces, refer to our documentation in the repository or published in the Grafana open source documentation.

Contribute

Want to help with the project? Read the Contributor's guidelines to learn more.